Afterparty(18)

Like Fabienne.

That was her name.

I look exactly like her. Blue eyes, auburn hair, everything.

Possibly explaining why the Lazar clan is stomping around Canada, unhappy I exist. And no amount of repairing the world, good deeds, and candle-lighting will make them see me as anything but a shiksa, a goya—which means a girl who’s not a Jew, but coming out of their mouths sounds like dirt, or worthless, or spawn of Fabienne.

As for my dad, any move I make that reeks at all of Fabiennishness—a bottle of Corona at a Fourth of July party in Chicago, a vintage Bob Marley T-shirt with a faintly stenciled ganja leaf in Washington, D.C., or any hint I might have what my dad quaintly calls unsavory friends anywhere—and he has visions of me morphing into her. Wandering off into adulthood in a substance-induced haze. Saved only by the all-purpose parental unit, squelcher of all hints of rebellion, fully capable of making everything fine.

What part of this is fine?

It’s as if he’s blundering though life in the misguided belief that she’s missing in the fine-and-dandy-let’s-burst-into-song way the Little Mermaid’s mom is missing. As if he overlooked the fact she’s missing in the succumbed-to-craziness, OD’d-behind-a-strip-mall-in-Ottawa, shot-up-and-left-me-behind-without-saying-good-bye, it-hurts-to-think-about-it kind of way.

“I can’t believe you were keeping that from me,” Siobhan says, rooting around in the pocket of her blazer for a cigarette. “Sorry I got weirded out.”

I wipe my face against my sleeve. Siobhan smooths the long grass and sits down next to me.

“No wonder you can’t piss off your dad,” she says. “The whole rest of your family sucks. Excuse you for being born. Don’t forget to leave your country and your language and your freaking religion at the door on your way out. And by the way, if you don’t stay corked in this magic lamp, you’re going to turn into a dead addict.”

I can’t stop crying. I say, “And my name at the door, too.”

“What?”

“My name. Amélie.” I can hardly say it. “My name. It got turned into Amelia in St. Louis and Emmy in Philadelphia and Emma in D.C.”

“You didn’t even get to keep your name? It’s not like you’re in f*cking witness protection, Amélie.”

Hearing the name in someone else’s mouth makes me crack open, when all I want to do is close back up. I say, “Don’t call me that. It’s like she’s someone else.”

In the knowing-exactly-why-I-picked-her-for-my-friend department: because she gets it in five minutes. Whereas sixteen years later, some people still don’t.

Siobhan lights a Gitanes, a French cigarette that smells like rotting garbage. “It’s not that bad. My mother is a crazy slut and I turned out great.”

“Don’t call Nancy a slut.”

“She gets new ones before she gets rid of the old ones. How slutty is that?”

“Well, it’s not like she’s going to die with a needle in her arm behind a mini-mart in Ottawa.”

Siobhan pauses, the cigarette halfway to her lips. She says, “Do you want me to tell Miss Roy you have cramps and go to my house?”

We spend the day sitting in Siobhan’s Jacuzzi, sunning ourselves on top of a wall of river rocks, immersing ourselves in steaming, bubbling water, cooking ourselves, eating Cheetos, and drinking. The skin on my fingers wrinkles in exact inverse proportion to the unfolding of the furrows in my brain where all the sludge has lodged, until my mind is a blank plane that stretches like the flat blue California sky, all the way to the almost invisible horizon.





CHAPTER TWELVE


“IS THERE ANYTHING YOU WANT to tell me about school?” my dad asks when I’m sitting in my room with chlorinated hair before dinner. “Such as why you weren’t there today?”

He could pass for eerily calm if he weren’t punching his left hand with his right hand.

I say, “I had cramps.” I lie without even planning to or thinking about it. I keep reaching new lows without even trying.

“I know that. Two phone calls. Since when do you leave school and go to a friend’s house and not call me?”

Once I start to lie, there is no limit to my creativity. “When I need Advil? If I had my own car, I could have just run home.”

“Not a wise moment to ask for a car.”

I wonder if being slightly drunk at lunchtime still shows after dark.

I say, “Please let this one go.”

“Should I let yesterday go, too? When your best friend tells me she sold Adderall in grade school!”

“She was joking! I don’t know why she acted like that.”

He shouts, “You know exactly why she acted like that! You know why you were drinking and why you walked out of school and you know if you ever planned to tell me.” He shoots me a look of pure parental devastation. “Did you?”

The slippage of Emma the Good into the gutter of parental disappointment is painful to watch. I look at my feet. I think, What would Emma the Good say?

The moral compass, spinning in horror, squawks, She wouldn’t have to say anything, moron. She wouldn’t be found in a hundred-yard radius of shit this deep.

“No.”

This is supposed to make me feel good: moral victory.